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I think there's something should sweep through the internet: Clearly labelling the country of origin of your site! It's not clear which country we are in, often, and therefore what money we're talking.
Followed by clearly dating the page.
abrogard@yahoo.com
:)Reply

Hi, can someone tell me if it would be a good idea to buy a computer running an amd sepron 3000+, i would be using it to run mid range games, and i would like to use internet and productivity software at a fast speed. Do you also think it would be faster than a celeron and comparable to a p4?

???? If a Sempron 2800+ is a Thoroughbred (166*12) and the xp 2600+ is a Thoroughbred (166*12.5) why can the Sempron be faster in some test's ? an error or are there some changes in memory speed ????? !!!!!!
Jens Reply

Woah, KF... that was a whole lot of stuff to post, quite a bit of it rather unrelated. You must have even more free time than me! ;)

Zebo, you apparently missed the point completely: "The overlapping Athlon FX, Athlon 64, and now Sempron names is going to really cause confusion among the *less-informed* public." The less-informed public doesn't include anyone reading hardware sites or OC forums. Yeah, Sempron is the value system meant to compete with Celeron, but both AMD and Intel are happy to sell lots of slower, "crippled" chips to the uninformed buyers. The 2.8 GHz Celeron chips were absolutely terrible performers - about as fast as a P4 1.8 or 2.0 - but Intel was more than happy to dupe people into purchasing those with their high clockspeed. The Celeron D is better, but the tactic remains the same. AMD is now joining them, calling lesser processors "3100+" and "2800+" and leaving it to the salespeople.

You don't think there are going to be plenty of salespeople pushing these systems with claims like "the Sempron 2800+ is basically just as fast as a 2.8 GHz chip, and the only difference between it and the Athlon 64 2800+ is the lack of 64-bit support, which really isn't needed anyway"? In sales, it's a lot more important to get a sale than to get a big sale. They'll shoot for the big sales if possible, but when someone wants a cheap system, they'll talk up the Sempron (and/or Celeron) as though it's just as good as a more expensive Athlon64/Pentium4.

That's what I meant when I said it's creating confusion, and that the confusion is likely to be an intended consequence. Car manufacturers do the same thing: you don't want an informed purchaser coming in to buy a car! You want the salesman to have the advantage, so that they can get the buyer into *any* Ford, Chevy, Honda, etc. and keep them from going to a different store.

Most PC shos (and car dealerships) make a set amount of money off of a sale, because the hard drives, case, monitor, RAM, etc. all have markups. So if someone buys a computer, the shop makes at least $100. $100 on a $500 computer is a good return. If they buy a $1000 computer, they might make $150 to $200. Granted, on the "luxury" computer systems that cost over $2000, they'll make a killing, but those are hardly ever sold.Reply

Great article! I'm looking forward to the overclocking one that's to follow. Things I'd like to see compared in it:

1)AthlonXP-m at 2.4ghz
2)Athlon64 3000+ at 2.4ghz
3)push the Sempron 3100+ as high as it would go without getting too hot with the retail heatsink
4)Do #3 with a good aftermarket heatsink

Probably do 2-4 with one of the cheaper mobo's like the Chaintech one (it's a budget CPU afterall).
Perhaps also do it with the $150 Epox board to see if there's a large difference, but if it's a large hassle, it's no big deal.

One thing that's bothering me is this mentality that s754 is dead and that s939 has the only viable upgrade path. How are people so sure without a doubt? If you go s754 now, you'll be able to upgrade to the 64 3700+ which is a pretty decent processor.

From what I understand, AMD is about to move into dual-core processors in about a year and won't those need a new socket to function?

The Sempron line turns out to be interesting to the performance-minded after all.

Now that AMD is scaling the performance rating/model number of their value line to Intel Celeron Ds, Intel zig-zags again. Why would Intel marketing permit consumers to make an easy, obvious and sound judgement, especially considering which way it would go?

>You don't mean to tell me you still believe AMD's line about "PR rating
>is scaled off the old thunderbird" do ya.:P

Since that is the only reasonable understanding, a reasonable person should. I didn't see TrogdorJW getting into this at all though.

Actually, the reference to TBird scaling disappeared off the AMD site maybe 2 years ago. At least I haven't been able to find it for years. What they did have (and somewhat hard to find) was a paper on a performance-based rating which AMD proposed. Surely no one at AMD truly believed Intel would ever go along, did they? What they don't have in the paper is what the base processor (the one you scale everything to) would be. Here's how you do it (in the paper.) You do the group of benchmarks and then do an averaging. AMD calls their averaging unweighted, which really means the weightings are 1.(If you don't pick a 1 weighting, then people will argue over the weighting factor.) Then you scale the average to a reference processor's rating. That could give you a ratio or per cent, but instead you could take the clock speed of one reference processor, to come up with a imaginary "equivalent" clock. Of course, true speed even within the same chip line doesn't scale linearly to clock speed; it is just pretty close when the clocks are pretty close; which makes the equivalence imaginary.

One problem is that the benchmarks that have the same name get updated by the creators at intervals. They might not have the same ingredients, or at least they have the newer version of the old programs. (QuakeIII vs QuakeII?) Should you keep the old benchmarks, which would provide a constant standard of measure, or if not, when should you phase in the new? If you change the base benchmark, then you no longer have an absolute scale. OTOH, if you don't change, you have a set of benchmarks which get further and further away from real-life performance. There is no way to settle this abstractly. As is well known, when Intel changes processor generations, programs get more optimized to the new processors on a timeline of a year or two. Do you go back and change the model numbers of the old models, now that everything on which it is based is changed? This amounts to the result that a rating (model number) which was conservative to start with gets to looking pretty dubious after 1-2 years. Right now Sempron-to-Celeron ratings look VERY conservative.The initial XP ratings were very conservative. People are satisfied when expectations are exceeded. They think that is as it should be. They get irrate if it falls short. Therefore you have to underrate to stay on people's good side.

I can see how a pure model number would be OK in the server market, where the buyers are likely technically minded and can figure it out on their own. And I can see how Intel could get away with it even with consumer chips; a higher model number is better, and worth more, even if you can't tell how much. Vaguarities can be worked to advantage. Salesmanship can make a big deal out of tiny differences, and "pump the chump" for more dough. There would be dismay anyway as Intel reverts to higher instruction-per-cycle chips for the next generation, and maybe doing this asynchronously will cushion that. If you do it simultaneously, you arouse suspicion. Intel will probably hand out brochures with there own "Intelmark" ratings during the transition, like they did in the 486-to-Pentium transition.

I think it is obvious that AMD picked the Tbird to scale the model number to because it was just about the same as the Pentium II/IIIs. That was OK while programs were still optimizing for that chip. As companies optimized for the various, drastcally different P4's, the connection to real-life performance of AMDs rating got pretty tenuous. They seem to have resynced this with A64 chips, but they aren't saying to what AFAIK. They are being vague about Sempron. Of course AMD marketing expects the rating to be compared to Intel chips. What else would people do? I have no argument with the marketing necessity of this for AMD. They are distinctly behind Intel in marketing savy anyway, and IAC AMD can't market the same way as the leader does. But AMD should have all the details spelled out somewhere for the technically and scientificly minded. These are the people that are (in effect) making or breaking AMDs reputation in the media. Getting on the good side of these people did wonders for the original K7. That, and a great chip too.

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>Along with the added reliability Intel offers
Intel doesn't offer any added realiability. About the only time you get into this is when you buy some oddball "blowout" revision on some closeout site to save $3. Sometimes I wonder about the sanity of system builders who do this and lose the bet.

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>the only real reason AMD got into the chipset business in the first place was because ...

There was another, rather more difficult to resolve, reason. To incease market penetration, Socket 7 chipsets were never restricted by Intel (there were a skillion makers), while Intel reversed course and denied licenses to the PII bus relentlessly, with the idea of heading off possible AMD PII clones (when AMD bought NexGen.) Intel had terminated (in court) any further cross-licensing to AMD, with the intent of shutting down clones from AMD. (Years afterward, they formed a peace treaty out of necessity.) VIA only lefthandly, and against Intel's determination, got a license by buying Cyrix from National Semiconductor. NS was unloading Cyrix for practially nothing after canceling whatever future plans it had, having effectively destroyed Cyrix in the interim. And Cyrix only got a license from Intel to settle a patent suit Intel was losing. Intel fought VIA in court but did not prevail. Intel never intended to let anyone get a license until AMD was kaput. Unless AMD was willing to develop a chipset for the K7, and give the rights away, there would be no K7. Rather than concede, AMDs solution was to license the EV bus from DEC (which was beginning to slide), but use connectors similar or identical to whatever Intel was using (to keep the product cheap.) Even with that, VIA directed its efforts to PII chipsets, and was very late for K7, until they realized what a smash hit the K7 was. None of AMDs "partners" ever sacificed or risked anything on AMDs behalf. They just cleaned up on eaay pickin's. The only reason Nvidia produced chipsets for AMD is that Intel to this day won't let them license for Intel's buses, other than within the MS XBox, which is what the Nvidia chipset was actually developed for. What would you rather do: Make a chipset for 20% of the market or 80%. It (apparently) is AMD's chipset design that makes the adaptation easy.

Derek, things I would like to see in the OC update? Ah, LOTS of stuff.

First, we really need a higher-end Athlon XP represented in the charts. Given the costs of the mobile parts and the number of enthusiasts that overclock them, at the very least a 2.2/3200+ would be a nice addition, and a 2.4 GHz Barton core would be good as well.

Going along with that, some OC values from the Celeron D would be good to include in the graphs (not the 775-LGA versions, though - the boards are far too expensive to be used in a "budget" system).

How about also throwing in the the other speed Spempron and Celeron D chips?

Another addition that I would like would be to actually list the clock speeds of all CPUs in parantheses (since the model numbers basically just serve to obfuscate that knowledge these days). While we should all know (hopefully) that the Sempron 3100+ is a 1.8 GHz part and the A64 2800+ is 1.8 GHz part, the more CPUs that are listed in a benchmark, the harder it's going to be to remember what's what.

Incidentally, your article was spot on in saying that the new processor ratings are garbage. Now that Intel has sort of followed AMD into the model number arena, I would like to see AMD drop the performance ratings (since they don't mean squat) and shift to model numbers like they have on the Opteron and FX parts. The overlapping Athlon FX, Athlon 64, and now Sempron names is going to really cause confusion among the less-informed public (which is maybe the whole point?)

Last request for the OC article: how about some OC attempts with the retail 3100+ heatsink as well as with an aftermarket heatsink? Since it's still a budget processor, a lot of people might want to just buy the retail version and overclock that a little bit instead of buying an extra $50 HSF.Reply

#39 - That would be the AMD750/751 chipset (at least for the earlier Athlon CPUs). When AMD first released the Athlon, and later with the switch to socket A, they created a decent chipset so that they wouldn't be dependent on the likes of Via, SiS, and ALi to provide quality chipsets. Hell, the biggest problems with the good old Super 7 CPUs from AMD (K6-2 and K6-III) was the POS motherboards and chipsets!

Luckily, the entry of Nvidia into the chipset market has given Via some incentive to not hold back (or delay) AMD chipsets, and now AMD has more or less exited the chipset business as their partners are doing a good job. I should note that the only real reason AMD got into the chipset business in the first place was because they had such a small market share that no one was concentrating on producing quality chipsets for them. It was always Intel systems first, AMD a distant second. The quality of the Athlon architecture helped to reverse that trend, and now there is a good market for AMD system chipsets.Reply

First the memory controller in the Athlon64 family is on the fricking CPU, they still need other chips on the mother board to run things.

Yes, AMD does make a chipset for the Opteron. But they also made a chipset for the AthlonMP and it matters as much as the Opeteron one does. What I am getting at is they are both server cpus that were supported.

Where are the chipsets for the T-bird, Athlon XP, Duron, Athlon 64, Athlon FX, and now Sempron.Reply

Well I would consider the Sempron 3100+ a reasonable buy, you can get a good Nforce 250 mobo with it, and have an upgrade path to at least Athlon 64 3700+. There are also gonna be extensions to that line to the Sempron line on Socket 754 as we go along.

Though It's a sorta in between Socket though, more advanced then Socket 462 but lower then 939.

LGA775 from Intel is probably best compared to Socekt 939. There will be LGA Celeron D's release in the future of course, when they will be offering, a suitable upgrade path with the I915 chipsets.

The Sempron for Socket A is a meh, I would say a Sempron 2800+ just edges out the Celeron D.

Is the Sempron 2800+ at least lower multiplier unlocked? Then you can simulate the other Sempron speeds from 2200+ to 2600+

And there is no point making to try an apples to apples comparison with AMD and Intel, their architectures just differ to greatly. K7 and K8 both seem to rely on their LV1 cache quite well, as they cope well with reduce LV2 cache.

Intel on the other hand has a small amount of LV1 Cache, and with Prescott their LV1 cache is not much faster then K8's or K7's is. not to mention that deep 31 stage pipeline. So 256Kb of minimum LV2 seems to be pretty critical.

Personally to me I would take a Nforce 250GB with the Sempron 3100+ that is a very good choice for me.

I wondered if your allowed to get the top off the Sempron 3100+ and see if it is a Newcastle with disabled LV2 cache or actually a Paris core with native 256KB of cache.

As said I would also like to include the Pentium 4 2.4A for comparison purposes, as well as the lower Semprons, a Pentium 4 2.8C would be nice as well.

Also with the inroduction of the Smepron AMD, can make more money, since these are only 84mm2 cores. Unless they decide to use some Thorton core's too.
Dunno about the Sempron 3100+... They saw they were offering too much value in the low end space so they decided to reduce it. :D so they can earn more money.

Of course an Mobile Barton 2400+ 35W will offer alot more value, but it was never AMD's intention of targetting the value sector with that processor :D

We might see value still see more chips for Socket 754 since mobile chips are based on this socket.
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yah, gotta wonder where he comes up with a statement like "along with the added reliability Intel offers...". This clearly comes from someone with no experience with AMD products. I personally have no qualms about either Intel or AMD when it comes to reliability. But if AMD offers more performance/$$ than Intel, I will always choose AMD.Reply

T8000, You're kidding right? I'll take an Nforce2 with onboard (asus A7n8x-VM/400 $81) over any onboard intel graphics. We're talking geforce4mx here. It can at least play some games. Intel's integrated graphics doesn't even come close even with the 915G chipset.

Jeez, up to 3x performance over Intel's integrated graphics...ROFLMAO. You go ahead and buy that Intel integrated crap chipset. BTW the 865/875 is no more current than nforce2. They are both old tech and both decent (uh, except when comparing onboard graphics...nvidia kicks butt here). Last page of toms review: "In addition, motherboards based on the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset offer more graphics performance than Intel's 865G platform at a similar and sometimes lower price"

So for $81 (asus a7n8x-VM/400) + Sempron 2800 $120 (which is probably REALLY HIGH...more likely $100 when hits pricewatch or less) we have $200 at most. You said it A P4 can beat it for the same money. Well, as soon as you throw in Intel's integrated graphics it doesn't matter what chip you have...YOU LOSE. But you won't spend less than $200 for a P4 and Integrated board. No way. You'd need a P4 2.4 or better just to cache the chip in speed. The graphics is an absolute loss regardless of choices.

Reliability/compatibility hasn't been an issue for a long time. FYI Intel has had 4 recalls in as many years. AMD has never had a recall :)Reply

I thought about that angle, and while it should work, the fact of the matter is that mpga478 is about to be just as dead as socket 462. If newer Celeron-D's were LGA 775, you could make a case for a better upgrade path with PCI-e and such.

I'm sorry guys, but I'm comparing the Sempron 2800+ with the Celeron 335, which runs at 2.8ghz. I'm not going to compare the Celeron to the Socket 754 3100+, as its name clearly states its a 3100+. If there was a Celeron running at 3100 or so, then I could compare them.

Comparing between the two 2800 classes, there just doesn't seem to be a nail in the coffin. Someone who is going to buy something like this is going to be happy with either one.Reply

With these small performance differences, I would say $20 more buys you a current Intel DDR-1/AGP platform (i865 + C335) instead of an old AMD platform (nf400 + S2800). Along with the added reliability Intel offers and the very inexpensive optional "Extreme" 2D graphics you can get, I do not think Sempron Socket A is a sensible choice.

For Sempron Socket 752, I think the added cost of getting a suitable mainboard places it in the price range of a Pentium 4, that will outperform it with ease.

So I think there is no reason to be so optimistic about Sempron, especially considering the benchmark selection in this review, that might make Sempron look better then it would in the real world.Reply

Personally, I'd like to see how the Sempron 3100+ compares with the Athlon XP 3200+. Plenty of folks are on the edge about whether to hang on to their Socket A mainboard through one more upgrade, or bite the bullet. As I just bought an Athlon XP-M and have it running stably at 2.4GHz (12 x 200), which would probably equate to about Athlon XP 3300-3400 speeds if one existed, I'd like to know if the advanced memory controller would be worth my while, or if I might as well wait until the Athlon 64 platform becomes more mature and Socket 939 CPU prices come down.Reply

Really, the Price/Performance analysis should be redone considering there's not a $20 delta between AMD and Intel mobos, and the Sempron 2800+ should be compared to the Celeron D 330. Not to mention the difference in retail / 1000 units prices, like #14 mentioned.
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No edit feature on comments?
Also, you can get an 865 for $56 at Newegg (new, ASRock "P4I65GV" i865GV Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU -RETAIL)
So that means that the gap between systems is really only going to be $17 between a Sempron 2800+ system and a Celeron 335 system.Reply

Another point, the Sempron prices you quote are in 1000 unit quantities, so on the penultimate page, there is no point if comparing the cost of a system, unless you remember that the Sempron will be $10~$15 more expensive than the price you quote.

Celeron 335 is $117 in 1000 unit quantities (on launch) and $127 at Newegg.
The Sempron will probably also be $10 more than the 1000 unit price.Reply

I was thinking - what is the electrical power (in relation with the other Athlons)? I am somewhat interested in a small and silent computer (socketA based) , and I would like to know which of those processons would be the happiest in crammed conditions

I might get one when they come out for Socket 939, just because of cost issues. The SocketA versions certainly sucks when compared to the 754 version and with the limited future for Socket 754 there's nothing tempting for me.Reply

One 'budget' chip you didn't include in the roundup is the 2.4A Pentium 4 (Prescott, FSB533, 1MB Cache). It's cheaper then the Celeron 335 and with overclocking it may provide some interesting results.

Good to see the loss of cache having little effect. From 1Mb to 256K of L2 there would be barely 5% loss in overall performance even in cache biased demos and benchmarks and probably less in real gaming. 256K of L2 is right on the money, all that is needed is the S939 flavor with the dualmemory channel and a lasting socket. The a64 will show its true colours in data streaming activities once software is written or compiled for it rather than P4 biased software. cant wait to see the overclock.

Looks like there's going to hardly a difference between a Celeron 335 and Sempron 2800+.
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Comparing the top celeron to middle of the road athlon on a old socket A? Comparing a more expensive celeron to a less expensive sempron...

Looks like there's going to hardly a difference between a Celeron 335 and Sempron 2800+.

I don't think anyone could sit in front of either of these processors and tell a real-world difference.

While this looks like a victory for AMD, I think its really slim victory and not much of a 'WE PWNED INT3L OMG!!!' victory.

No doubt the overall cost of the Intel system will be higher, but will it matter for OEM's like Gateway/Compaq, etc?

I imagine we'll see systems using both from most manufacturers but the only downfall I see here is that regardless of which system you choose, you're already outdated with a very minimal upgrade path.Reply